Avoiding the Coming World War

My background is easily told:

I was trained throughout my 20s as an academic historian. I have two successive degrees in Modern History from the University of Oxford where I specialized in modern industrial America and in the past 200 years of Russian history through the Czarist and Soviet periods.

I then did three years of postgraduate study in modern Middle East history at the London School of Economics.

My main teachers and mentors were Isaiah Berlin, the great historian of philosophy and political thought and Elie Kedourie, the greatest authority in the 20th century on the history and evolution of the societies of the Middle East.

I have published seven works of history and political analysis myself so far including a political history of the United States “Cycles of Change” and on the emergence of the modern Middle East “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East.”

I have served as Professor of Transnational Crime and Terrorism at Bay Atlantic University in Washington, DC and was Arnaud de Borchgrave’s right hand man in setting up the pioneering Transnational Crime Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.

However, my key expertise is the nearly 39 years so far since January 1986 I have spent covering US-Soviet/Russian relations and domestic US politics for various major news outlets – primarily The Washington Times, United Press International and over the past decade the Sputnik News Agency.

At the very beginning of this long period, I covered the start of a long golden age in at least coexistence and the reduction of tensions between the United States and the West and Russia. It started with the series of summit meetings between Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that led to the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) in Europe Treaty.

I was also the State Department correspondent for the Washington Times from January 1993 to January 1999 through the two Clinton administrations when I witnessed the crucial switch in US thinking from a lazy, confident, but much slower and casual drift towards extending NATO and US influence throughout Eastern Europe to an urgent focused priority. That change was triggered by the horrors – small though they were by today’s Ukrainian conflict standards – of the Yugoslav Civil Wars from 1992 to 1995.

The key change came when a reelected Bill Clinton in January 1997 replaced his passive, well-meaning but slow and utterly useless first secretary of state Warren Christopher with the intellectually narrow but forceful, focused, hard-driving and obsessively Russian-hating Madeleine Albright – the personal protege and even puppet of former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. From then on – the drive to expand NATO eastward relentlessly without limit and without end to where we are today, became the bipartisan obsession of both the republican and Democratic parties’ foreign policy elites in Washington.

In my judgment, the main drive for this did NOT come from the giant defense contractors. Like so many too-large dinosaurs and other enormous grazing life forms, they have no higher cognitive capability than the continuation and expansion through eternity of their own profit margins. Everything else is far secondary – less than an afterthought.

In my close and sustained observation, the main source has been the ever-growing echo chamber of the ferociously anti-Russian mini states of Eastern Europe. These have consistently welded vastly more influence in Washington than Israel and the Saudis combined, yet unlike Tel Aviv and Riyadh they have never ever been significantly opposed, identified or called to account for it.

Which leads us to where we are today: On the Brink of Armageddon. In a situation where thermonuclear war can break out and annihilate us at any time.

“What is to be done?” as Nikolai Chernyshevsky asked in his seminal novel of the same name in 1863.

And then Leo Tolstoy shamelessly appropriated the same title for his little utopian eruption of nonsense in 1886.

Here are the two individuals most worth trying to contact and influence over the next three months, as analyst Alex Krainer has presciently identified: They are: US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Charles “CQ “Jones.

For it is they and they alone who have tried to put a break on the mad stampede of the Gadarene Swine in the Biden administration to destroy civilization in a global nuclear war between Russia and the United States.

It is they alone who at the latest meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group led by the United States at Ramstein Air Base in Germany on September 6 tried to block Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s relentless demand for long range strike weapons to hit strategic targets deep within Russia. 

President Vladimir Putin has warned this is the last red line before Russia will respond. And he has also spelled out what that retaliation would be – A War Like No Other in the history of the world.

I have covered Putin professionally since he first took power in Russia almost a quarter of a century ago. He isn’t joking.

It took 14,000 Russian dead from US-backed neo-Nazi terrorist attacks on the secessionist provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk to bring him to this point. It took scores of thousands of Russian casualties in the Ukraine conflict – where at least 600,000 Ukrainian men and the entire remaining generation from ages 17 to 45 have already been propelled to their deaths by US policies – and the figure by now is certainly far higher – to bring Putin to this point.

Urgency is therefore required. But you are all academics and academics always have zero impact as outsiders on senators, congress members and government diplomats and policymakers – all of whom are convinced they are superior to you and know better. 

Conferences are a waste of time. Ponderous, dignified endlessly and lovingly argued-over declarations and statements are a waste of time.

Even bringing out a million people onto the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco or New York City would be a waste of time. Today you would need to peacefully mobilize 2 million people onto the streets of Washington DC alone to have any hope of impact: And they would probably be able to discredit even that.

To all of you – with all the books, papers and articles you have endlessly written – I urge you to watch and rewatch a movie just out that you will all certainly despise “Reagan” – starring Dennis Quaid, directed by Sean McNamara and written by Howard Klausner. Incidentally, it has not been banned in Russia but is hugely unpopular there.

I am not defending the balance or overall historical accuracy of the movie. But I knew Reagan personally. I enjoyed my access because he loved what I was writing in the Washington Times about the coming disintegration of the Soviet Union. But the movie gets the key central point about Reagan’s recognition of the need to avoid thermonuclear war absolutely right.

Reagan – the arch anti-communist, came to terms with Gorbachev because, like John F. Kennedy before him, he was appalled in 1983 when he was forced to face the reality of what thermonuclear war would really mean. 

Totally senile Joe Biden cannot begin to grasp that reality, if he ever could.

Kamala Harris has all her life never displayed the slightest cognitive or imaginative capabilities of being to do so either.

I do not have to apologize for or defend any of Donald Trump’s failed and irresponsible financial policies or his ludicrous, catastrophic appointments of Mike Pompeo as CIA Director and Secretary of State and John Bolton as National Security Adviser during his own four-year term of office.

But in his presidential debate with Kamala Harris, it was still only Trump who raised and recognized the need to end the Ukraine war at once – and prevent the cataclysmic slide into thermonuclear conflict. She didn’t. Not once.

And now Trump is the only slim thread of hope we have left. He is the only possibility we now have of averting thermonuclear war, as I believe Senator J D Vance would also try his utmost to avert in Trump’s place. 

The idea that a vote for Jill Stein, whom I debated on Iranian television a decade ago is a moral or realistic choice is absurd. 

Ms. Stein is a nice, well-meaning, ineffably ignorant and stupid lady. She hasn’t a clue. I do not expect at least half of you to accept this. You will remain convinced that your own moral fastidiousness – so dear to you that you will die in thermonuclear hellfire rather than accept this simple, clear but Oh! so inconvenient fact. 

A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for thermonuclear war. It is a coward’s and a hypocrite’s vote. It is an abdication of your moral responsibility to the American people and the human race.

The only course of action for any or all of us that offers any hope – or true moral validity is this – that we each do our utmost to influence any policy maker or influencer that we can personally reach to end the sending of any long-range strike weapons to Ukraine. There are still one or two senators like Rand Paul or Josh Hawley who can be directly reached on this.

Leading hawks of both parties from the Cheney’s to Marco Rubio to Richard Blumenthal – all of them – need to be abused verbally in every public appearance and asked why they are so determined to see their own children and grandchildren burned alive.

This is simple, direct and extreme peaceful democratic politics. It will be embarrassing and disgusting to most of you. But there is no other path left in the fragment of time we have left to try and save the human race.